Systems have been developed for automatic wire preparation and handling and wherein a number of wires are cut to length, stripped, furnished with crimped contacts and have at least one end thereof inserted into a multi-wire, high density connector. For such automatic wire handling systems it is necessary to provide crimping apparatus capable of accommodating different size wires and contacts, and capable of rapidly and automatically crimping the contacts upon the wires. For example, in the co-pending application for Method and Apparatus for Wire Processing of Homer Eaton, Ser. No. 615,933, Filed May 31, 1984, assigned to the assignee of the present application, there is shown a wire processing apparatus in which wire is withdrawn from a supply spool, measured, marked, cut to a selected length, wound upon a small reel with both ends of the wire protruding from the reel, grasped at its protruding ends in a pair of clamps mounted on a continuous conveyor, moved past end finishing stations, such as stripping and crimping stations on either side of the conveyor, and unloaded from the conveyor as a finished length of wire wound upon its own individual reel with both ends having selected contacts crimped thereto and protruding from the reel.
Existing wire crimping apparatus for applying contacts require large amounts of space, and thus make it difficult, if not impossible, to provide for selectively attaching contacts of a plurality of different sizes to successive wires of different sizes that may be carried one after the other by the conveyor. Moreover, prior crimpers are neither sufficiently fast nor sufficiently precise in positioning of the contact to accommodate the high speed wire processing available with the above-described equipment.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide improved methods and apparatus for crimping contacts upon wire ends in such a fashion as to avoid or minimize above-mentioned problems.